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Mario D'Alessandro 279 WOMEN POETS OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE. COURTLY LADIES AND COURTESANS Edited by Laura Anna Stortoni Translated by Laura Anna Stortoni and Mary Prentice Lillie New York: Italica Press, 1997. 267 pp. I n her well-known essay "Did Women Have a Renaissance?" (in Women, History and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, pp. 19-50), Joan Kelly concludes that "there was no renaissance for women". Thankfully, Laura Anna Stortoni, the editor of Women Poets of the Italian Renaissance, disagrees with this view, and her anthology of 19 Renaissance women poets is itself meant as a response to Kelly's argument. Although Stortoni and her collaborator, Mary Prentice Lillie, "agree that social restrictions on Italian women in the Renaissance were considerable", they nevertheless point out that "the abundance of Italian women who wrote and published poetry in the Renaissance is staggering, and was not considered by Kelly, who appears to have known only Vittoria Colonna" (XXVI-XXVII, n. 3). Their most convincing argument against Kelly's thesis comes in an endnote in which they offer an impressive list of over 130 Italian women poets from the sixteenth century alone. The 19 women poets anthologized are the following: Lucrezia Tornabuoni de' Medici (1425-1482), Antonia Giannotti Pulci (1452-?), Camilla Scarampa (15th century), Barbara Bentiviglio Strozzi Torrelli (c.1475-1533), Veronica Gàmbara (1485-1550), Aurelia Petrucci (1511-1542), Leonora Ravira Falletti (16th century), Vittoria Colonna (1492-1547), Olimpia Malpieri (?-1559?), Tullia d'Aragona (c. 1510-1556), Chiara Matraini (15151604?), Laura Bacio Terracina (1519-C.1577), Isabella di Morra (1520-1546), Lucia Bertani Dell'Oro (1521-1567), Gaspara Stampa (1523-1554), Laura Battiferri Ammannati (1523-1589), Veronica Franco (1546-1591), Moderata Fonte (1555-1592), Isabella Andreini (1562-1604). Stortoni's introduction provides a useful concise history of women's literature within the cultural context of the Renaissance. Although writers such as Compiuta Donzella and St. Catherine of Siena had achieved literary success in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the number of women writers increased greatly in the following two centuries. Two significant factors contributed to this tremendous flowering. The first is the rise of humanism. Many women of high social status -Isabella D'Este, Giulia Gonzaga, Veronica Gàmbara, Vittoria Colonna (XIV-XV)- enjoyed the same humanistic education as men, and this very often permitted them to govern states, either directly or in the absence of their husbands. More significantly, however, the studia humanitatis "lent [women] faith in their own capacity for literature and poetic endeavors" (XII), and many women, learned in the Mario D'Alessandro 280 Classical languages, began writing prose and poetry in Latin. Among these are: Battista Malatesta (1348-c. 1458), Laura Cereta (1469-1499), Ginevra Nogarola (1419-1465), her sister Isotta Nogarola (1418-1466), Cassandra Fedele (c. 1465-1558) (XIII). A second contributing factor is the rise of print and the wide diffusion of books (XV). Translations of Greek and Latin works became readily available and made classical culture easily accessible to all. The rise of print, moreover, also inspired the great number of women writing in the sixteenth century to publish their works. Stortoni cites Rinaldina Russell's claim that between 1539 and 1560 women authored 56 editions of books (XV-XVI), and in 1559 Ludovico Domenichi published his first anthology of poetry written exclusively by women: Rime diverse d'alcune nobilissime et virtuosissime donne. The mid-sixteenth century also saw the rise of middle and upper middle class women writers such as Chiara Matraini, Laura Terracina, Laura Battiferri Ammannati, Lucia Bertani Dell'Oro, Isabella Andreini (XVIII). Highly educated and brilliant upper class courtesans, or cortegiane honorate, also began to emerge as significant literary figures. These were very often the daughters of courtesans or the "brilliant and beautiful daughters of impoverished families, who were unable to aspire legally to any improvement in social class" (XIX). Writers and poets such as Tullia D'Aragona, Gaspara Stampa, Veronica Franco and Isabella Andreini belong to this class. Stortoni and Lillie do not include translations of any Latin works, and they devote little space to fifteenth century writers. They do include Barbara Torrelli's sonnet "spenta è d'Amor la face", considered by many to be the finest poem ever written in Italian (18), and the bulk of the anthology is devoted to the greatest and best known writers from the sixteenth century. These include Veronica Gàmbara and Vittoria Colonna, along with Gaspara Stampa, considered by Stortoni as possibly the greatest Italian woman poet of all time. The outspoken Venetian courtesan Veronica Franco, who had rejected "Petrarchism...[and] wrote in terza rima or in prose" (170), also receives considerable attention, as do Tullia d'Aragona, Chiara Matraini and Isabella di Morra. The last author covered is Isabella Andreini, the most famous dramatic actress of her time and perhaps the most versatile of the writers included in this anthology (she wrote not only rime, but also plays, letters, dialogues). Each poet is introduced by a highly informative biography that is a stimulus to further study. Along with a general bibliography, the editor also provides essential bibliographies for each author. In their excellent translations of the poems, Stortoni and Prentice Lillie attempt to strike a balance between adherence to the "literal sense of the Women Poets of the Italian Renaissance 281 original" and the desire "to create a composition that would read as a poem in the English version" (XXXI). They eschew straight prose translation and strive as much as possible to preserve "the formal metrics of the original Italian texts" (XXXI). In order to avoid any distortion of sense, however, they do not keep the end-rhyme patterns of the original poems. As they had hoped, Stortoni and Prentice Lillie succeed effectively in making their translations " a s transparent and fluent as possible" (XXXI), and the English versions work successfully as "arrows" pointing the reader back in the "direction of the original text" (XXXII). On several occasions the editor promises the reader letters written by the women authors, in particular Veronica Gàmbara's letter to Ludovico Rosso in which she discusses her desire to live a simpler life, and Lucrezia Tornabuoni's letter to her husband describing the virtues of a prospective bride, Clarice Orsini. She also omits a brief piece from Tullia d'Aragona's Dialogue on the Infinity of Love. Her failure to include these prose excerpts is an unfortunate oversight. Perhaps this omission will encourage her to produce an anthology devoted exclusively to the prose writings of Renaissance women. By employing the same excellence and devotion demonstrated here, I am certain that Stortoni would give us a work just as valuable as Women Poets of the Italian Renaissance. MARIO D'ALESSANDRO University of Toronto,